This is in response to the article by AP reporter Lara Jakes in the Nov. 1 Times Argus, titled “Iraqi PM: Terror found a second chance,” in which the prime minister of Iraq is asking the U.S. for aircraft, missiles, interceptors and other weapons as well as possibly military special forces and additional CIA advisers to help train and assist Iraqi counterterrorism troops in order to beat back a bloody insurgency.

What reporter Jakes neglects to tell us is that in 2004 the U.S. Congress/Rumsfeld provided Gen. David Petraeus and former Col. James Steele up to $2 billion to replace the Iraqi police force with torture centers and uniformed Shiite militia death squads using torture tactics and operations similar to those that Steele had used in a similar capacity in El Salvador in 1980s in its civil war that left 75,000 civilians dead.

With this $2 billion, Steele and Petraeus also oversaw the training and operation of the Shiite torture and death squads and even provided them lists. The Shiite death squads were to get revenge for atrocities of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime prior to the 2003 Iraq War. This tactic apparently did take the pressure off the U.S. occupation forces, but it also was one of the main causes of the ongoing full-scale sectarian civil war now continuing in Iraq.

This and further information can be found by viewing the website of the “Democracy Now” news report of March 22 or online viewing of the British BBC documentary titled “Searching for Steele” by former Guardian award-winning foreign correspondent Maggie O’Kane.

The following are established facts: 1) Iraq had nothing to do with the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings; 2) Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction; 3) Iraq was no threat to the United States; 4) Iraq was anti-al-Qaida before the U.S. invasion; and 5) Iraq has the world’s largest underground oil supply and the multinational oil companies remain in business in Iraq.

The latter must be what White House spokesman Jay Carney was referring to when he said that continued U.S. aid to Iraq is “necessary” and “denying that assistance would be contrary to our interests.”

Jakes’ article seems to be an example of a recurring pattern of U.S. covert involvement being misrepresented to the public in order to justify further U.S. entanglement with Iraq. We evidently need to look further than the mainstream media and the AP for accurate and objective news reporting.